Saturday, March 26, 2005

The woman behind Groklaw

"I don't track it. A journalist asked me some time ago, and I investigated and it was 2 1/2 million a week then. That was back when SCO seemed like more of a threat, so I believe it would probably be less now on quiet news days, but I don't really know. Would you want to know? Groklaw is noncommercial, so it doesn't much matter. I don't have to impress advertisers. Groklaw doesn't actually need to be big to be effective. In fact, it's the opposite in a way. I've taken steps to keep it as small as I can. Past a point, it becomes more work to administer than is helpful. I need to stay focused on certain elements, and size brings a certain kind of extra work that I'd rather not deal with until the SCO case is over.

You have to admit, numbers like that are intimidating. At least they are to me. I'm shy by nature, and it makes me nervous when I realize how many people are reading Groklaw. I met an executive at LinuxWorld who told me that he knows people on Capitol Hill are reading Groklaw. Some of his employees, he told me, have their phones set up to notify them every time there is a new article. I told him he was making me hyperventilate.

Don't get me wrong. I'm very grateful people like Groklaw, and I'm happy so many want to read it. I'm proud of what we've done. But usually I try not to think about numbers. When I'm writing, I think in my mind like I'm talking to a group of real friends. I know that our membership has continued to grow, though. We have just under 8500 members now, and of course most of our readers are not members. I write an article, go get a cup of tea, and when I come back, there are maybe 100 comments. There is no way to describe that feeling."

darkonc writes "It looks like they didn't learn from the BSD debacle (where, having sued Berkley for copyright infringement, AT&T found that they were using BSD code without acknowledging it's source). Groklaw has an article detailing how SCO has documents created by and for Groklaw on their site -- without even acknowledging the source. It seems that the defenders of the holy IP principle have hoisted the skull and bones."